


Katara Alone

by cablesscutie



Series: At the Crossroads of Destiny and Decision [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Badass Katara (Avatar), F/M, Letters, Mutual Pining, Self-Discovery, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-02 16:54:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24480187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cablesscutie/pseuds/cablesscutie
Summary: The war is over, and with it goes the only life she has ever known.  In this era of love and peace, the world is becoming new, and Katara is unsure of her place in it.  That's okay though.  Katara has rebuilt her life from scratch before, and she will do it again.
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Series: At the Crossroads of Destiny and Decision [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1880146
Comments: 187
Kudos: 923
Collections: Zutara Month 2020





	Katara Alone

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a quick Zutara Month fill, but ended up being a very long love letter to Katara. I tried my best to do her character justice and help her find the resolution she deserved.

With Zuko’s coronation, the war comes to an end, and with the Avatar at his side, they welcome the world to a new era of love and peace. It is not evident yet, but there is a promise for the future, a vision of the world coming back into balance, the pieces fitting together once more.

Katara shatters.

Her life is objectively much better after the end of the war, but she finds that she feels completely out of place in it. Life as she knew it evaporates before her eyes. She is used to being driven by an overarching purpose and savoring smaller happinesses she carves out of the ruin around her. While her life has not been long, she has known nothing else than bitter winters with barely enough to go around, longing for absent parents, snatching sleep between running for her life and fighting for the freedom of the world. Without fending off death and destruction, she finds that she doesn’t really know what she wants out of life. There’s no sense of what she should be doing.

She has had offers. She could travel the world with Aang, helping the Avatar. She is always welcome to go home with Dad and Sokka and help there, but her father has also returned and the council has been reconvened so it’s not as though they’re without leadership. Suki even extended an invitation for her to train with the Kyoshi Warriors for a time. But none of these people _need_ her. In the final days before the comet, Katara and Zuko had found themselves turning to each other for advice and support, since they were the most mature of the assembled group. But now she can’t even offer her assistance to him - she knows nothing about governing a country like the Fire Nation, and between Iroh and Mai and the Fire Sages, she figures he has plenty of support. The Earth Kingdom is back under the rule of a newly empowered King Kuei, which is great, but Katara doesn’t have enough of a relationship with him to presume she would be needed there.

On principle, she refuses to take any option that would leave her as the somewhat unnecessary accessory to a more powerful man, so as the festivities in the Caldera wind down and friends scatter to the wind, she decides to take off on her own. She’ll hit the road and figure things out for herself. Katara has rebuilt her life from scratch before, and she will do it again. It may be lonely, but she has never been alone before - at least not in a way that felt indefinite like this.

Since she’s already there and without Appa or a ship, she’s traveling on foot, she figures the Fire Nation is as good a place as any to start. At first, her only real direction is to get some distance between herself and the capital. So she takes her bag of meagre belongings and what little money remains from their days on the run, and finds a fishing boat willing to take her to the outer islands in exchange for taming the currents in a dangerous shortcut.

“Write to me?” is all Zuko asks of her when they say goodbye. He is the only one who never asks her if she is sure about her plan or tries to sway her towards another option. He of all people understands the value of finding your destiny the hard way. It means a lot to her, actually, this easy acceptance of her decision. Sometimes it bothers her how Zuko seems to recognize something deep inside her that most people skip over - the way he’d spoken to the darkness in her when he offered to help her hunt down Yon Rah, the shared grief they found in the crystal catacombs - but there is also the faith he placed in her when he asked her to help him face Azula. Now, she thinks she is able to be properly grateful for that feeling of being known down to her soul.

* * *

Because of this, he is the first person she writes to when she gets dropped off at the docks of a familiar fishing village and finds a room in a shabby boarding house. _Dear Zuko_ , she writes. _I landed in a village in the outer islands - as it turns out, I know it. It’s a little fishing village on stilts in the middle of a river..._ She writes the story of her brief days as the Painted Lady, and paints a picture of the town as it is now. It’s not bustling by any means, but the people that are there are happy, the children clean and well-fed. _Looking at them, I find myself remembering how much of the purpose I found traveling with Aang came from little side-trips like this, helping the villages that hosted us. Don’t bother writing me back here, though_ , she warns. _This has been a nice visit, but these people don’t need me anymore. I guess it’s going to be a little longer before I find where I’m going._

Even though he hadn’t asked her to explain why she needed to embark on this journey, she finds that most of the first letter ends up being her sorting through it for herself. It is a bit of a rambling mess, and painfully honest at some points. When she reaches the end and signs off, she has a moment of hesitation where she thinks she won’t send this one. All of the uncertainty and listlessness she described makes her feel so vulnerable, but she ultimately decides that it feels more wrong to write another and send him a polished draft. This letter is what would have come out if they had been together, awake too late at night in the Ember Island house and speaking in low tones over slightly bitter tea. This letter is her honest self, and it has taken her too long to find someone who can handle that for her to start holding back now.

When another trade ship stops in the village a couple days later, Katara is readily granted passage after one of the men at the docks tells the crew how she’d saved the river from the factory pollution. They assure her she’s welcome to stay aboard until they reach the ocean and have to turn back, an offer she gladly takes them up on. As they zig zag their way down the river, stopping to offload and onload wares at villages along the banks, Katara realizes that the impact of her actions in that one small village spread downstream as well. She hadn’t thought about it at the time, but as dirty as the river had been at the factory, it would’ve had to spread. Dozens of little towns had been sickened and impoverished by the military factory as Ozai had prepared to declare himself king of the world. At every port, the crew spreads word of her deeds, and she finds herself inundated with thanks. Not once is she introduced in connection to the Avatar or Fire Lord - she is Katara, the waterbender.

When they arrive at the ocean, in a town called Kurenai, Katara bids the crew a grateful farewell, and they wish her well on her travels. They recommend an inn where they have stayed before. The captain knows the woman who owns it, Wei, and when he tells her who this new guest is, she offers her a small room in exchange for helping prepare the meals. _Dear Zuko,_ her next letter reads. _I hope you won’t mind if I just kind of ramble on for this letter, but my thoughts aren’t really organized enough to write you a good letter. I still have no idea what I’m going to do here, but if I learned anything travelling with the others, it’s that if I unpack and start to relax, adventure will come. These river villages may not need me, but other people will, and I think I’m starting to realize what I can do now. There have to be problems like this all over that aren’t spiritual unrest or international conflicts that require the intervention of the Avatar (or the Fire Lord). I can go to the places where people have been forgotten_. And where she won’t be a sidekick, she thinks. _I can make change in my own way._

The man behind the counter at the post office looks at her questioningly when she informs him she has a letter to send to the palace, taking in her plain clothing and clearly foreign looks, but he accepts the coin she places on the counter and doesn’t comment aloud. She watches him tuck her letter in a bin labeled WEST. That night, while she and Wei are fixing dinner for the few other guests at the inn, Katara asks,

“If someone wanted to find out what goes on in this area, where should they go?” Wei eyes her curiously, but apparently she passes inspection because she says,

“The gossips and sailors all end up by the fish market.”

So the next morning, Katara asks if she can go do the shopping for the inn, and gets directions to the market. When she arrives, she wanders the stalls quietly, keeping her ears open for snatches of conversation. People are wary to talk in front of a strange traveler at first though, so eventually she mentions to the man behind the crab stall that she is helping Wei at the inn and is here to pick up supplies for dinner that night. At that, the man lights up, asking what they’re making, pointing her in the direction of the right vendors for the supplies.

Once he speaks to her, a couple of the little old ladies doing their shopping start chatting her up, asking where she’s from.

“I’m from the Southern Water Tribe,” she tells them, reveling in the novelty of being able to be proud of where she comes from as they both make impressed noises. They ask if she is the one who defeated Princess Azula, and her smile is sad when she admits that she is. “Technically. I was just defending Fire Lord Zuko,” she insists. That derails them briefly into a discussion of how they are so pleased that he has brought peace. They mention that he must be more his mother’s son - Princess Ursa had always sounded like a lovely young thing when news from the capital made it out this far.

“He’s a good man,” Katara says, smiling a little. She files this moment away to write about later. Zuko could probably use the assurance that even if the nobles and foriegn diplomats are unenthusiastic about his rule, there are citizens that believe in him.

“I suppose he would have to be, to earn the trust of the Avatar _and_ a waterbender.”

The other woman adds, “If only the _rest_ of those well-to-do families would realize that times have changed, we’d be a lot better off.” Katara’s ears prick up immediately.

“What do you mean?” She hopes she’s coming off as passingly curious instead of desperate for information.

“Oh, well up in the mountains there’s the Shih family. They own the mine there, and most of the town around it, and they’re just terrible. The place is a death trap, and they never bother to fix anything. Young men from here won’t go to work there for anything. It’s part of why things were so hard until the river cleared up - they couldn’t fish, and they couldn’t go to the mines. A lot of them ended up enlisting in the army.”

“A lot of them never came back,” the first woman says, and Katara’s heart aches in sympathy.

That night, she bids Wei farewell, and thanks her for her hospitality, promising to stop by again before she leaves the region. The next morning, she is sent off with a bag of food for her journey and a crudely drawn map, on foot again and feeling like she is really getting somewhere. She walks for hours, breaking only to eat lunch in the shade during the hottest part of the day, and then heaves herself off the boulder she’d perched on to continue until sundown. Her feet are sore and her dress is covered in dust, but the grit and grime of rough travel feel like accomplishment. She washes herself and her clothes in a stream and makes camp in the woods, electing to string the canvas of her tent up like a hammock and sleep where the light of the moon can wash over her.

As she is falling asleep, she looks up at the sky and thinks of Yue. She hopes the princess would have approved of Katara’s choices now. She vows that one day, the world will know just how much of themselves the women of the water tribes have given to make this peace.

She reaches the small mining town the following evening, and finds that there isn’t much of anything in the way of lodgings. When she inquires around the small market, she is told that it has been many years since the town has received visitors that were not coming to stay with family or find work, so there are no rooms for rent. Her trip is not for nothing though, and she at least manages to acquire some rice to cook with the last of the vegetables and cured meat from Wei, as well as some indication of where to find the mine itself. That night, as she sits by the fire, Katara begins composing her third letter to Zuko.

 _I’m not sure what I’ll be able to do for these people_ , she admits. _The family that owns the mine isn’t even here, and if they were, I doubt they’d agree to fix the mine just because some strange girl shows up and tells them they should for the greater good. It took me a couple days to get here, so I guess I’ll stick around at least long enough to check out the mine, but I might be headed back to Kurenai much sooner than I expected. I’ll probably have to figure out how to catch a boat, so you may not hear from me for a while, but I’ll write again once I find somewhere to stop._

In the morning, she hikes a little ways up the mountain until she hears the clanging and clamoring of the miners. She emerges from the woods, and it takes a few moments before anyone sees her, everyone on the site appearing too tired or too engrossed in work to realize they have a visitor. The first person to notice her is the man who seems to be the administrator she had been warned about.

“What do you think you’re doing here?” he barks at her. “This is no place for children!” She bristles immediately. It has been a long time since anyone has dismissed her like this, and before she can get a handle on her temper, she shoots back,

“I’m here because the whole island knows this mine is a death trap and _your_ bosses refuse to do anything about it!” A couple of the other men slow in their work to glance at her out of the corners of their eyes.

“My bosses own this land, and they do not take kindly to trespassers - leave!” Katara feels her face twist up in fury. When her fists clench, she can feel the water in the sifting trays stop flowing, awaiting her command.

It has only just occurred to her to loosen her hold when there is the sound of a blast from within the mine shaft, and the ground beneath them trembles. Her muscles tighten, her stance shifting to ground her out of habit as she feels the vibrations ripple. As the rumble dies out, it is replaced suddenly by an ominous cracking, followed by alarmed shouts as workers start flooding out of the tunnel in a panic. She and the administrator turn to watch, and she sees the moment the entrance starts to give way, the supports holding up the sides buckling as the top bows downward.

Reflex makes Katara rush forward, reaching out, and shoving forward the water she still holds. There is more panicked yelling, and the men who were outside rush towards the forest to escape the confusion. A cloud of dust and dirt rolls out of the mouth of the mine, but the entrance is still standing. The tunnel is now being held together with ice, much to the amazement of the miners and administrator, who Katara immediately turns to and demands to know,

“How many men work here? Exactly. I know you know.” He stutters out that there are 113 employees including himself, and she climbs up on one of the sifters. She sticks her fingers in her mouth and lets out the sharp whistle Sokka taught them when they were children. Quiet falls around the work site. “Everyone line up where I can see you right now!” The men blink at her for a moment, but as soon as a few of them start to fall in, the others follow suit, even if some of them are grumbling about women or foreigners. She counts them quickly, twice, then checks her number against the administrator, who finally introduces himself as Senichi. His expression tightens for just a second when she gives her name, and she gets the sense that this man may not be the biggest fan of Zuko or the Avatar.

She finds that his opinion of them matters very little to their situation once they start working together. There are twenty men missing after the cave-in. Katara starts pacing, trying to cobble together a rescue plan. For a fleeting second, she feels a stab of longing for her friends - for Toph and Aang’s earthbending, or Sokka’s strategic mind - but doesn’t let it fester. She is the one that’s here; she is the one who will figure a way out of this.

To start, she calls for more water. Barrels are quickly filled from the well spigot. She swirls some around herself as she thinks. Stepping inside the entrance to the mine, she glances around to assess the damage, but finds it too dark.

“I need light!” she calls back. She expects a lantern, but is surprised by a young man barely older than herself racing to her side and calling a flame to his hand. It reminds her of Zuko’s unwavering faith in her, and of the way he used to casually use his bending to reheat their bowls of soup or cups of tea.

“I can make it brighter if you need,” he tells her. “I just wasn’t sure how much heat the ice could take.”

“It holds pretty well with bending,” she says. “You can make it bigger.” He obeys without question, and the increased light is enough for her to inspect the walls and ceiling. The area past the ice walls is holding steady, but the ceiling is riddled with fissures. She freezes them shut before proceeding forward, and as they slowly shuffle forwards, the firebender tells her,

“My name is Kano.”

“Katara.”

“It’s nice to meet you. I’ve never met a waterbender before.” Bitterness wells up in her chest out of habit, and a part of her still wants to snap, _You can thank your precious Fire Lord for that!_ She swallows it, reminds herself that what happened to her people is not this boy’s fault, isn’t even the current Fire Lord’s fault. Zuko is the opposite to his father - he’s the reason Kano and so many other Fire Nation citizens _will_ get to meet people from the other nations peacefully.

“Well you might get to meet more than just me now,” she says.

They only make it around the first shallow bend before they see the tunnel completely blocked in. Katara feels cold, but she shouts “Hello! Is anyone back there?” They wait, and Kano crouches at the seams in the boulders. Suddenly, he perks up.

“I heard them! They’re back there,” he tells Katara. “We’re going to get you out!” he promises the trapped men. He stands up and leads her back out of the tunnel. When they emerge alone, faces fall, even Senichi’s.

“There’s people in there,” Katara reassures the crowd. “But the tunnel is blocked a little ways in.”

“We’re going to get them out,” Kano promises, stepping up to her side. He looks to Katara, and with a determined glint to his eyes, says “We’ll have to clear the rocks. It’ll be dangerous. But I’ll be in there digging, even if I’m the only one.”

“You won’t be alone,” Katara promises. “I can help ice the tunnel to keep it as stable as I can.” The assembled crowd is quiet for a moment, and then one man edges his way out of the middle and crosses to them.

“I’ll be with you too,” he says, hefting his pickaxe onto his shoulder. Nervous whispers ripple through the air, but a couple more come forward, and then a couple more.

In the end, there are less than ten who volunteer to go back into the tunnels, but more offer to help supply water and fetch dinner for those who are venturing in. Senichi sets up a rotation schedule for three crews of three to go at a time to minimize risk and keep from shaking the walls too much at once. Katara and Kano elect to trade off between just the two of them leading the crews, which means they get less rest, but neither feels okay doing it any other way. They work as quickly as they dare, but by sundown the best they’re able to do is pick a hole big enough to pass some apples and lychee nuts through and find out that there are seven of them in there, only a little banged up. Kano comes sprinting and whooping out of the mine to tell them the news, and a cheer goes up. Four more men promise to join the rescue attempt tomorrow, and the mood around the fire among the miners that had stayed to watch and help is light.

Katara pulls out her letter to Zuko to continue it. _So I guess you should forget everything I just said,_ she begins a new paragraph. She tells him about the cave-in at the mine, and how she and Kano are leading a rescue. _I feel a little out of my depth though_ , she confesses. _I couldn’t just leave them, but I can’t help but think that Aang and Toph would be much more useful here. It’s going to take us ages to get through at this rate, and we don’t have that kind of time. Most of the men trapped are still further in, which means we haven’t been able to get them food and water yet. They could be hurt._

She bites her lip and looks up into the flickering campfire. A few times, she came across Zuko meditating in front of candles, and she thinks that she maybe understands why it’s so effective. Contained like this, the rise and fall of flames is soothing, almost like a beating heart. As the warmth pulses across her face, she wonders what he would do in her situation. _If you were here you’d probably have some useful advice for me. You usually do. Or at least you remember some useful advice from your uncle - like the form for redirecting lightning he got from waterbenders. Maybe you could tell me how to waterbend like an earthbender._

It’s a joke when she writes it, but it nags at her late into the night, while she helps a crew chip away at the rocks bit by bit, a lantern lighting their way in the dark. She makes more progress with her bending than they do with their pickaxes, but not by much. _Not by enough to make a real difference_ , she thinks bitterly. As they work, she thinks about the commands she heard Toph barking at Aang during their earthbending practice. She tries planting her feet firmer, squatting lower to the ground. It gives her a little more leverage, and she thinks the gouges she cuts grow a little deeper, but it’s not what she needs. She experiments with forms, but that doesn’t work as well, and sometimes doesn’t work at all with water. Thinking maybe the answer lies elsewhere, she throws out a few of the firebending forms she and Zuko had worked on adapting, but that doesn’t do too much either.

Finally, she has a breakthrough - literally. She remembers when Toph was trying to get Aang to stop dodging and deflecting her attacks. She’d and made him split boulders as she flung them at him. Katara tries to move her fingers in the same cutting way Toph had demonstrated. The water surges forward as she had wanted it to, but it just fits itself into the cracks that she had already made. It feels like the water is pushing at the edges of the grooves, but not making any headway. When they had traveled in the Earth Kingdom, she had learned about how canyons were formed by rivers wearing away at the earth for thousands of years. Remembering this information now, she feels the weight of her frustration and exhaustion pressing down on her, and with an irritated huff, freezes the water.

Even if she couldn’t feel when the rock gave against her bending, she would know from the resounding noise of the shallow gouges widening into deep cracks. The miners flinch away from the pileup at the sound, but when nothing else happens, they stop. Katara glances up and around her to make sure her ice is holding on the ceiling and no new fissures appeared. When she realizes that it’s safe, she beckons the men back.

“If I freeze the rocks fast enough, the ice makes the cracks bigger,” she tells them, and they look at each other with renewed hope.

“Stand back, everyone,” one of the men calls through the hole. “The waterbender is gonna bust you out any minute now.” It takes significantly longer than a few minutes, since it requires a lot of force and concentration to get the water to push in tight enough to work right, and they still can’t risk just breaking through the whole cave-in, but they make a lot more progress.

By the time the sun is coming up and Kano’s crew comes to switch places, Katara is really feeling the strain, but they also have the hole almost wide enough for a person to crawl through. They come forward eagerly, congratulating the others heartily and waving excitedly at the men they can now see dimly illuminated on the other side.

“You should go to bed now,” Kano tries to tell her, but Katara is having none of it.

“We’re almost there. I’ll take a little nap when they’re out and you guys can tend to them before we push on. I have to see this through now.” After a glance at her determined expression, he lets it go, but he encourages the others to work just a little faster than they had the other day.

The sun is still climbing when they pull the first miner through. They’re all weak and aching, but they are able to walk out on their own. Katara wants to offer to heal them, but she finds herself holding back, thinking of how much worse off anyone left in the cave will have to be by now. While everyone else celebrates, she scarfs a bowl of rice and fish and then collapses on her bedroll, leaving Kano with strict instructions to wake her when the crews switch again.

She is shaken awake what feels like seconds after falling asleep, but she feels a bit better than she had before. When she leads the next group in, she has to crawl through first to ice the weak parts in the tunnel again, and Kano comes along to light her way once again. He doesn’t strictly need to be there, but the company is appreciated all the same. They are silent this time, more solemn. The next cave-in is further in and when they call, the response is faint, but someone is there. A crew rushes in to join them, and they get to it right away.

Now, Katara sits to the side to rest while they pick at a small area, trying to give her good starting points to break a doorway into the pile. After a while, they stand aside, and someone brings her a few buckets of water. She forces the fissures wider, and between attempts, the miners come again to knock away the loose bits. It barely registers when Kano returns once more to bring her a rice ball and freshly-rested men. While she waits, she tries again to write by lamplight. _You might like to know that thinking about you and Iroh actually gave me a pretty useful idea_ , she continues her story.

She goes on to explain how she got the rocks to crack, and there is a hint of pride in the words before she gets back to her worries. _We got some of them out this morning, but if the rest of them aren’t beyond this next barrier, I don’t know that we’ll be able to get to them in time. The miners have a well at the site, so they don’t really carry drinking water, and the shafts are dry. Still, we’re making progress. As long as we keep going, we should be able to get to the ones back here, however many they are. We haven’t been able to speak with them yet, which means still no food or water, and that’s what we’re racing against._

At long last, a pickaxe strikes a rock and knocks it inwards to clatter into the space on the other side. The crew crowds the opening immediately, calling for anybody who can hear them. In a thin and halting voice, someone replies that there are three of them. They are all weak from thirst and hunger, and one man is injured and hasn’t been able to wake up for a while. Katara sends one of the crew to get Kano and tell him to get all of the men up. They need to run some food and water into the second chamber quickly, and if the third man is as bad off as they think, they’ll need to all work to open the first hole enough to carry him through. Efforts are redoubled, and the urgency burns in all of them. Katara stops taking breaks, prying rock away shard by shard, her water forcing its way through.

It is nerve-wracking work though. The walls are even weaker this close to the blast site, and Katara has to ice the walls completely to hold it together. Nobody dares speak it aloud, but they are all clearly afraid of collapsing the other side of the wall before they can get anyone else out. Still, the third man does not wake, so they speed through the work as best they can.

Kano’s group finishes with widening the first opening and filters in to join them. They skip dinner, and the hole grows wide enough that Kano climbs through to the other side to help two of the men out. Each of them staggers into the light supported by other miners. When they leave, Katara hoists herself through as well, crouching beside Kano where he is attempting to inspect the third man.

There is a large, ugly gash on his leg, red and inflamed with infection already from the grime caking it. He is sweating and shivering, and Katara calls water to her hand immediately. She checks for other injuries, but doesn’t find anything else significant, so she gets to work healing his leg. At the sudden glow of her hand, Kano rears back in surprise a little, and Katara smiles fleetingly and tells him, “Some waterbenders have healing abilities too.”

“That’s amazing,” he breathes, watching with fascination as the wound is cleaned and infection soothed away, skin starting to knit together. He looks at his own hands, gently cupping a glowing flame over her and her patient. “I wish I could do something like that. It would feel a lot more useful than being a lamp.”

“A good friend once said that fire is life,” she tells him, hearing Zuko’s voice beneath her own as he clumsily dispensed more of his uncle’s wisdom. “Having grown up in the south pole, I’m inclined to agree. ‘Fire can be dangerous and wild’,” she remembers him telling Aang. “It can do great good though. In the right hands.” Katara nods at Kano’s own hands, and he looks to them again, thoughtfully.

“Your friend sounds very wise.”

“He had a good teacher,” she says, but thinks of how Zuko himself would undoubtedly shrug the credit off onto Iroh, and adds, “but he’s very wise too.”

Beneath them, the miner groans and shifts, but does not quite wake. A small rock tumbles down from the ceiling, and a cry goes up from the crew outside the wall as the tunnel starts to shake again. They hadn’t been able to carry enough water for her to make another ice barricade this far in, so Katara tells Kano, “Grab him.” She helps him pass the man through to the others, and they shout at them all to get out as fast as they can, more sounds of shifting dirt roaring around them. Katara tumbles through to the other side when Kano shoves at her back, and she turns to pull him along after her. They run as fast as they can while the sound of the tunnel and Katara’s ice barricades breaking chases them.

After the second cave-in there is truly nothing more Katara can do for these people except to leave them to mourn in private, but she accepts Kano’s offer of a bath and a hot meal at his mother’s house before she leaves. The food is simple but lovingly made in a way that makes her homesick despite the fact that the flavors are still new to her. Around the fire that night, Kano confesses, “I’m glad I don’t have to keep going back in there, but I’m still worried. Until the Shih’s come back and the mine actually gets fixed, I won’t have any work. I don’t know how I’m going to feed my mother and little brother until then.”

Katara looks into the fire for long moments and wonders how this town ended up so vulnerable and lonely. How could a single accident starve them all? She reaches into her pack, and hands him a few coins, all she has left of her travelling money except the bronze piece she’ll need to pay for her letter once she gets to a post office. He tries to refuse, but she insists.

“I won’t even see another market until I get back to Kurenai, and I found work at the inn there. I’ll be fine. Plus, I know what it’s like to have a brother you need to take care of.” He meets her eyes, and she recognizes the weariness in them - from her own face, from Sokka’s, from all of her friends and so many more people she passed in her travels. They are all children aged too fast by the war.

They hug goodbye at sunrise, and his expression is absolutely priceless when she tells him that should he ever want to write to her, he can direct his letters to the Fire Lord’s palace until she has a permanent address. She knows that Zuko will keep anything that arrives for her safe, and that he won’t pry no matter how curious he gets. She tells him this at the end of her letter: _You understand that some things need to be just mine._

She goes back to Kurenai and tells them what happened with the mine, and Wei and the sailors from earlier promise to make sure the village gets food until the mine is properly repaired and people can go back to work safely. It is a relief to know that these people will be able to help each other after she moves on. She feels again like this is something lasting that she has helped to build, this love between neighboring towns. This time, she tells Wei she won’t be staying long, just until a ship comes from another island, but the woman is happy for the company regardless and welcomes Katara back into her kitchen. She also gives her a letter, an odd look on her face as she hands it over, and Katara realizes abruptly that it is because the letter bears the seal of the Fire Lord.

Heart tripping in her chest, she races up to her room to read it. She is aware that it will be in reply to the one she sent when she first arrived in Kurenai rather than the one she just mailed detailing the mine, but she looks forward to it all the same. When she agreed to write him, she had supposed it would be more a check in for Zuko’s peace of mind. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might actually try to reply while she’s on the road. Surely the newly-crowned Fire Lord has more than enough on his plate without writing letters that might never reach their destination.

 _Dear Katara_ , he had written. _You should know that I don’t mind you rambling at me at all. I’m going to assume the fact that I still haven’t gotten another letter means that you either haven’t found adventure yet or you found more than you bargained for. Uncle and I are placing bets. He’s got a couple silver pieces on you being “called to the sea”. I think it’s a little bit cheating though since that’s really vague and he said it after I bet him that you picked a fight and ended up leading a revolt. So far none of the reports of civil unrest sound like your handiwork, but Sokka told me that prison breaks apparently run in your family, so I’m not counting myself out yet._

_Which brings me to the serious part of my letter. I know you’ll get mad at me for saying it, but thank you. You protected my people when I couldn’t, and I will always be grateful for that. The Fire Nation, and I personally, will never be able to express how much your compassion and forgiveness have meant. I have learned so much from you about what it means to truly want and believe in peace. Sometimes in meetings I find myself thinking about how you would react when my advisors keep pushing half-measures or when I start getting annoyed at the ambassadors. Actually, you would probably shout at them too, but I know you’d talk me down to something more reasonable anyway and that helps._

_If you’ll allow me to do a little rambling of my own, things on my end have been a little confusing lately. Mai doesn’t have much patience for court dealings either these days, and I’m just not sure how to make her happy. I think she might be feeling a little bit like you - unsure of her purpose. At first, she was following my sister and her parents, and then she never fully joined Aang like I did, she just stopped my sister from killing me. It seems like she doesn’t know how to act in peace times because she never fully decided what she wanted during the war. Ty Lee fitting in so well with the Kyoshi Warriors certainly hasn’t helped. So, if you’ve picked up any great wisdom, I’d love to hear it. Safe travels._

_Yours always,_

_Zuko_

* * *

Katara travels through the Fire Nation all during the rainy season, pushing back flood waters, and healing injuries sustained from typhoons. Meanwhile, Zuko keeps receiving reports of the now-famous waterbending master popping up all over his country and saving villagers from disaster. Her letters usually arrive shortly after a sighting is rumored, detailing her own troubles and triumphs, painting rich pictures of the lesser-known parts of the nation and the people she meets. He feels as though he has met some of them himself, a feeling which is only compounded by the ever-growing pile of letters that have arrived for her from an increasing number of places.

As it becomes clear that it will be some time before Katara plans to pass through Caldera City again, he asks her during one of her longer stints in a village if she would like him to send at least some of the letters he has received. She declines, saying that though she would love to be able to write back, she couldn’t possibly take all of them on the road with her, and she would hate to have to discard them. Instead, he has one of his secretaries start mailing back small cards to the senders to inform them that their letter has been received and will be kept safely at the palace until Master Katara has completed her journey. Selfishly, he hopes that will be sooner rather than later.

Mai breaks up with him eventually, and although she has done so many times already, he knows that this time is final. _Neither of us were yelling this time,_ is how he explains the feeling to Katara. _Which oddly enough makes me think it’s really going to stick now. Probably because in the past it’s been over petty fights, and this time we just kind of decided our relationship isn’t going anywhere. I’m not sure either of us ever thought concretely about being together forever, but she told me straight up that she’s never going to do the Fire Lady thing, which I understand. She spent her whole childhood having to be perfect and quiet because of her father’s political career; it would be cruel to ask her to bend to another set of rules for the sake of my politics. But the reality is, I’m going to have to get married eventually, and whoever that is is going to have to deal with court at least a little bit._

_It’s not all as cold as that of course. When it comes down to it, Mai wants freedom more than anything, and for her that means no strings to tie her down or hold her back. That’s not for me, though. As much as I love Uncle and our friends, and as much as it scares me, I think I really do want a wife and kids eventually. Not like I really would get to opt out, but I want a partner._

_I could feel you doing that thing with your eyebrows the entire time I was off in my cabinet meeting, so fine. What I’m writing around saying is that I want to marry for love. Maybe my mother took me to see too many plays, but I just couldn’t stand to have a marriage like my parents, or even like Uncle and my aunt. He almost never speaks of her, and when I asked him why, he said they didn’t know each other very well. I always thought that I was so impossible to know, but I’ve realized recently that that’s not true. Uncle always knew who I was. Aang saw the possibility for us to be friends even when I was still hunting him. And you’re right - you were the first person to trust me. Back in Ba Sing Se. Going back to a time before I had all of that is just unthinkable._

_Yours Always,_

_Zuko_

He feels a little silly sending letters about his predictably pathetic personal life in the face of the struggles she is encountering, from poor roads in the mountains outside North Chung-Ling holding up essential supply lines to exorbitant local taxes leaving people impoverished. She’s never responded as though she thinks his problems are shallow though, and he can’t help but think that if anyone would still dare tell him when he’s being selfish, it would be her. As much as he might want to ask her questions about affairs of state, he finds himself reluctant to do so. Katara turned down all the offers of companionship she got and struck out alone because she doesn’t want to spend her life cleaning up someone else’s mess. And Agni knows Zuko’s first years as Fire Lord are turning out to be rather messy.

One thing he _really_ doesn’t mention for fear of making her feel like he’s doubting her abilities, is that he’s started sending out relief units to wherever she has been as a matter of course. Rather than waiting around to send an investigator to go and compile a report and requisition the troops through bureaucratic channels, he just tells his generals to dispatch a few ships. Sometimes they get there and everything is fine, but sometimes Katara was only able to prevent immediate catastrophe - like the mine that was so reprehensible it inspired his labor minister to propose a whole series of worker safety reforms. In those places, soldiers arrive with sacks of rice and tools to dig away debris and rebuild homes, and his ministers solicit reports from local administrators projecting what they will need to make repairs or feed their residents. He is obsessed with his work, he knows, but he cannot stop scouring reports for glimpses of her.

_Dear Katara,_

_You know I hate to bother you with Fire Lord business, but for this letter only, please forgive me. If it has not already been made clear from my other letters, I am in awe of you, of what you are doing for so many people. Lately, my reports are making it seem as though my advisors and ministers are equally (though not similarly) awed. They aren’t quite sure what to make of this kind of guerrilla heroism and are starting to get antsy about what your actions mean for the government._

_I’ll have to tell them something, because some of the more paranoid voices are starting to talk themselves around to this being another mounting coup. They would stop speculating so wildly if I said you were travelling in an official capacity and sending me reports, but that’s not true, and would give me credit I don’t deserve. It’s not my place to divulge the more personal reasons for this journey, so I figured I would ask you what you want me to say, even if it’s just to order them to leave me alone about you._

_I promise that’s all for the boring stuff. In more exciting news, I’m including some tea from Uncle that he insisted you will love. While he was visiting recently he told me to pass along the message that he misses you, particularly your excellent palate (which I think was meant to be a dig at me as much as a compliment to you). He also said that if your travels send you through the Earth Kingdom, he will be deeply offended if you don’t visit him in Ba Sing Se. Would you come to visit me if I guilted you like that? Somehow I doubt it. I think you would call me an imperious jerkbender and dare me to come find you myself. Maybe I should. I miss you._

_Yours always,_

_Zuko_

The letter feels painfully sincere, and he feels his fingertips grow warm against the paper as he contemplates burning it rather than mailing it. In the end, he calls for a messenger before he can fully talk himself around to that. So what if his feelings about her are too blatant? He recalls Uncle Iroh’s question over tea just before his departure: _Would it really be so terrible if she knew?_ Worst case scenarios flood his mind immediately, but he is slowly able to dispel them. Katara would not be cruel, even in a rejection. Perhaps she would step back, write less frequently or stop altogether. The thought of not getting those updates from the road, of losing the privilege of her intimate confidence, pains him. Still, he knows she would not cut him out. For all his insecurities, he knows that their friendship runs strong and deep. It may take time to recover, but he has earned her forgiveness for far worse crimes than loving her.

* * *

Usually, the heart-racing anticipation of receiving a letter from Zuko is sated once she reads it, and she feels calm. There is none of that reassuring peace to be found in his latest letter. Instead, Katara finds herself staring at the ceiling of her rented room long enough to miss dinner, waiting for her heart to slow down. Each time she feels herself start to center, the final lines jump to the forefront of her mind again. _I think you would call me an imperious jerkbender and dare me to come find you myself. Maybe I should. I miss you._

She feels the itching under her skin that she has come to interpret as the signal that she needs to move again. Usually it hits her a few days after the resolution of whatever latest disaster she has averted or wound she has healed, but she is only just starting to get to the bottom of the bandit problem in this region. In fact, her blood had still been singing from the thrill of a good hard fight when the innkeeper handed her the letter. For the first time though, the vague discomfort feels like it has a clear answer: she wants to go to him. Her thoughts echo his words. _Maybe I should. I miss you_. When she finally falls asleep, she is thinking of the soft look in his eyes when they parted. _Maybe I should._ When she dreams, she hears the familiar low tones of his voice. _I miss you._

_Dear Zuko,_

_If this is your melodramatic way of asking if I’m going to skip out on your birthday party, don’t worry_ , Katara writes back, her hand shaking. _I wouldn’t miss it._ _Besides, you haven’t been an imperious jerkbender to me in quite some time. If you have been to other people, I’m sure your advisors deserved it._

_You can also assure those paranoid old men that I’m not planning to depose you (although they’re definitely right that I could if I wanted to.) As more details about what went down to end the war are getting farther out into the rural parts of the country, people are starting to recognize me as Aang’s waterbending master and the one who helped you take back the capital. It might please your advisors to know that the people have been very eager to ask me what you’re like in person, and I’ve assured them that you are a very nice young man._

_Funny that you mention the Earth Kingdom, I think that’s actually where I’ll be shipping off to next. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Fire Nation now, and as much as I’m enjoying it here, I think there’s got to be worthwhile work there too. Their dry season is coming up and the almanacs predict that it’s going to be a rough one. Guess we’ll find out how much use a waterbender is in a place with no water. Letters might come slower since I’ll be international, but I promise they’ll be coming. And you can tell your uncle that I would never dream of passing up an invitation to the Jasmine Dragon._

At the end of the letter, she agonizes over how to sign it. When she’s hopping around from place to place, she tends to write the letters in fits and starts, and she doesn’t always even bother to sign the letters with anything besides her name. Now that she has been here long enough to have something resembling a proper correspondence with him, she doesn’t know what to do. In letters to her father and Sokka or to Aang, she always ends with “Love,” her handwriting expansive and swooping as though to convey how much she wishes it were a hug. But the idea of sending that to Zuko makes it feel different. Like she would be crossing the line into sending love letters. She puts down her brush with a frustrated groan, and lies down on her bed again, lamenting that _this_ is what she decides to get so caught up on, when she has been so much more vulnerable and tender to him in letters past.

This is finally what allows her to sign, _Love, Katara_ and seal it before the ink is even fully dry. She reminds herself that it’s not as though it matters very much. For whatever she has allowed herself to confess in writing, she is still running away from him. Setting sail to the other side of the world seems to fairly negate whatever implications are in her words. That cowardice, surely, will drive away whatever fleeting desire her absence has conjured.

* * *

It is the dry season, which brings rolling droughts to the central Earth Kingdom. The sun scorches everything - the crops, the people, the rivers. After her sudden decision to leave the Fire Nation, Katara calls in a few favors and arranges transportation out, and when she arrives at the coast of the Earth Kingdom, she starts walking inland. It doesn’t take long to start hearing word of villages feeling the strain of the arid weather. She follows tips and hitches rides here and there until she finally meets a farmer named Jiahao who has come to town to sell what meagre harvest he was able to salvage from the crops baking in his fields.

“This happens every few years,” he says. “It just never gets easier to deal with. There’s a lot you can plan for, but not having water…” he shakes his head. “The region isn’t exactly swimming in it at best, so there’s only so much we can afford to stock up.”

“I’m a waterbender,” Katara tells him, and his eyes widen in surprise. “If anyone can help your village, it’s probably me. If you bring me back with you I promise to try everything I can.” Jiahao is stunned by the offer and for the moment he openly studies her, she is afraid he might reject her, that it is too soon after the war for strangers to be trusted in the Earth Kingdom. But his expression resolves and he nods firmly.

“I’m afraid we won’t be able to offer you proper hospitality,” he says, hands wringing in front of him, ashamed. “But if you bring your own food, my wife and I can at least give you shelter.”

“Thank you, that’s more than enough.”

With the little money she had made mending fishing nets in the last port town, she buys cheese and dried meat and some bread that looks like it will keep alright. She hesitates over a bag of rice, which she knows would make the rest of her food stretch better, but she thinks about having to ask for the water to cook it and buys bags of potatoes and apples instead. The supplies probably won’t let her stay very long, but she also isn’t sure that she’ll even be useful once she’s there and she’d rather not be presumptuous. Jiahao helps Katara load her things into the cart with his own supplies, and then offers her a seat up front where he’s steering the ostrich horses.

“So,” he says, once they’re underway. “What brings a waterbender to the Earth Kingdom this time of year?”

“It’s a pretty long story, honestly,” she admits. “But mostly because I want to help people. Any way I can.”

“Well, I won’t pry, but if you wanted to get something off your chest, home’s definitely far enough for a long story, and I don’t get much excitement.” Katara smiles politely, and means to thank him and decline, but instead she finds herself saying,

“I guess I just didn’t really know what to do when the war ended. And when I thought back to what had made me feel like I was contributing _during_ the war, a lot of it didn’t come from fighting. It came from the people we met while we were traveling, and all the other ways to make the world a better place.” Jiahao hums in agreement.

“I was a soldier for a time when I was younger,” he says. “When my father passed, I was allowed to leave the army because the country couldn’t afford for farms to stop producing, but I got to meet some very interesting people on my travels. I even saw the Great Divide once.”

Katara perks up and says, “I’ve been there too! It’s really beautiful.”

“Except for those canyon-crawlers. Eech!” Both travellers shudder at their respective memories, and then they catch each other’s gazes and burst into laughter.

From then on, they pass the journey trading stories of far-flung places and terrifying animals and hairbrained schemes hatched with friends. And while Katara doesn’t mention that one of her friends that seems to get into the most trouble is the Avatar himself, or that the stuffy jerk that’s been growing on her is the Fire Lord, she feels like she is being more honest than she has been in ages. It feels good to talk about her friends and their adventures like this, as though they were just like the scattered groups of Earth Kingdom rebels - a band of teenagers out of their depth and trying to make a difference, and goofing off to beaches and festivals as they went. Nobody has spoken to her like she and her friends are young in quite some time, and it’s refreshing to have her stories not met with awe or a legend they have reminded someone of. Instead, Jiahao laughs uproariously at the idea of her and her brother having to pretend to be their friend’s parents because he insisted on going to school and got in trouble, and then tells her about having to dress up as a commanding officer when a couple of his friends got themselves drunk and arrested at a stopover town with a rather fastidious local militia.

It is the middle of the night when they arrive at a simple house, low and square, flanked by fields. Though the moon is not full enough to make out much, Katara can hear the dryness of the plants as the breeze rolls through, and the grit in the air tells her that the soil is blowing away as well. Jiahao’s wife, Lian, blinks at the pair of them in confusion, rubbing her eyes tiredly as she takes in the traveler on her doorstep, but welcomes her when he explains that she is a waterbender travelling to help with the drought. He explains that he had promised her a safe place to sleep, and Lian nods and ushers them both inside, waking up more and starting to fuss over how tired they must both be from the journey. A folding cot is produced for Katara and set up in the corner of the family room.

“I’m sorry we can’t offer you much in the way of privacy, but there’s a folding screen,” Lian says, as Jiahao carries it out from where it usually blocks off a changing space in the couple’s bedroom.

“Really, this is great,” Katara says. “Thank you. I told Jiahao on the way over here that I’ve been camping more often than not since I left home during the war.” If anything, the declaration makes Lian fuss more, and Katara briefly allows herself to be comforted by the tutting over how that’s really no way for a girl to grow up, and accepts an extra blanket and pillow she almost certainly won’t need. She feels a stab of homesickness for the first time in what now feels like a very long time. Gran-Gran used to get like this during the winters, when they were all going stir-crazy being inside for so long and when she was so afraid of her small grandchildren freezing in their beds. She wouldn’t stop heaping furs on them until Katara and Sokka were sweating and the two of them would have to wait for her to fall asleep before they could kick off the extras. The memory is so vivid that despite the dry heat of the room, she falls asleep swearing she can smell snow.

The next morning, Jiahao and Lian introduce Katara to their daughter, Jing, who stares at Katara in fascination.

“You really get to travel all on your own all the time?” the little girl asks, and Katara laughs, shaking her head.

“I haven’t always. When I was a little younger, I was with my brother and our friends, but since the war ended it’s been just me.”

“Wow,” she breathes, and absently stuffs a spoonful of jook into her mouth. “Your parents must be _really_ cool. Mom and Dad would _never_ let me travel the world by myself.” At this, Jiahao and Lian’s faces go tight and uncomfortable as they watch Katara carefully.

“Jing, honey, not everybody’s parents…” Lian trails off, not quite sure how to finish suggesting to her daughter that Katara might not _have_ parents to forbid her.

“Honestly, my Dad would love it if I decided to go back home,” Katara says to save her from that particular conversation. “And I think I might for a time, but for now he understands that I need to be out here helping people.” She eyes Lian and Jiahao before telling Jing, “As for your own parents, I’m sure they just want what’s best for you. But the world will be a much safer place by the time you’re my age, so who knows. Your Dad tells me he’s been to some pretty amazing places. Maybe he’ll take you one day.” Jing looks to her father with the same wide eyes she’d turned on Katara and asks,

“Daddy will you pleeease?” Her father laughs, but smiles adoringly at his daughter as he says,

“If we really are entering a ‘new era of love and peace,’ nothing would make me happier than to see it with you and your mother.” Jing squeals excitedly and runs around the table to give her parents and Katara exuberant hugs before running off with the rest of her breakfast to look through her father’s old maps and start planning her adventures.

“Well, now I guess I really have to make sure I deliver,” Katara says, smiling after the girl. Jiahao smiles at her a little wearily.

“If your travels happen to take you to the Fire Nation, make sure you tell that new Fire Lord there’s a little girl really counting on him making good on that promise.”

“I’ll be sure to give him a talking-to about it.” Katara says it as if she is joking, since she has yet to explain that she is the waterbender that traveled with “that new Fire Lord” and the Avatar, but after a day of inspecting drying fields and the town’s dwindling water reserves, she writes to Zuko anyway.

_I’ve been asked to inform you that if you don’t come through with this new era of love and peace thing there’s going to be a very disappointed little girl here. She’s counting on being able to travel the world when she gets older, and her parents won’t give her permission unless it’s safe. Not trying to put more pressure on you - I know you’re already too hard on yourself - but I know hanging out with Fire Nation nobility doesn’t always inspire confidence in the process. Thought it might make you feel better to know that there’s already a generation that’s hoping and making plans for the future in ways we couldn’t. The war was still happening when Jing was born, but it ended so quickly for her. She’s not going to learn the fear and hatred, and she’s already forgotten the time her father was gone fighting. If I can just make sure her village survives this drought she’ll get to grow up in a world that is kind to her._

The next day, Katara goes out into the town center and stares deep into the central well.

“This is the deepest one in town,” Mayor Cao says. “It ran dry two weeks ago. Until the rains come at the end of the summer, there’s nothing left.”

“What usually happens this time of year?” Katara asks her.

“The crops our farmers grow are very well adapted to dry climates, but last year’s rains were even less than usual, and we were plagued by dust storms. The crops might not die quickly, but they have stopped growing even though most of them are not ready for harvest yet. The wells are fed by groundwater, but because of the bad rains, the water table was already lower than usual. Now they can’t reach.”

“Can’t you dig the wells deeper?” Katara asks. Mayor Cao shakes her head sadly.

“That far down the ground is too solid.”

“Earthbenders?”

“None left. The ones that survived the war haven’t returned. They found partners and got married elsewhere or got work from the big cities. The reconstruction of Omashu alone is calling nearly all of the remaining benders away from this region.” Katara’s brain seizes on the hint of a solution.

“But if you could get one here and the wells got deeper…”

“Possibly.” Mayor Cao frowns contemplatively. “But we wouldn’t know until they tried, and we can’t afford to hire a well-digger on a chance that there might be water. If our crops do die, the town’s remaining funds will have to go to shipping water and food in for the residents.”

Katara tries to reach out with her bending, trying to feel for water beneath her feet the way she can feel the water in Mayor Cao’s body and in the town storehouse and in Jiahao’s crops. Nothing comes. But maybe if she gets closer…

“Would you mind if I climbed down your well?” she asks. Mayor Cao looks shocked, but tells Katara to wait anyway, and returns shortly with a confused-looking young man with a long coil of rope over his shoulder.

“This is my son, Chen. Chen, this is Master Katara. She’s a waterbender.” Chen looks at Katara skeptically.

“My mother says you need to go into the well?” he says, as though hoping he had misunderstood. Katara nods.

“I can’t tell if there’s more groundwater deeper down from all the way up here, but there might be.” Still looking like he thinks Katara has possibly been drinking the cactus juice, Chen loops the rope over the beam that holds the well bucket and watches her fashion the end of the rope into a harness. Then she dangles herself over the empty well, and with a deep breath, lets go. There is a lurch, and the rope digs into her thighs, but then she starts to descend gently as Chen carefully lets the rope out. She has a lantern that casts shadows on the stones around her as they pass slowly, and it feels like she is suspended for ages, though she knows that it is just the anxious feeling of the cramped darkness making time seem to expand.

When her feet touch the ground, she gives one quick tug on the rope and calls up, “I’m at the bottom!” The rope stops moving, and she quickly untangles herself, leaving it to hang in the air. The lantern has a metal hook that she hangs off the loops of the harness so she can see the ground beneath her and use both hands. Immediately, she is aware that the rock beneath her feet is damp, and she kneels down to put her hands on the slick surface of it. The cool shock feels so good, and it occurs to her suddenly how much she has been feeling the strain of carefully rationing water to use only the smallest amounts for drinking and bathing. She reaches out, trying to chase that feeling, calling the water to her, imagining her fingers sinking through the stones and following tiny veins of water through the ground. Breathing slowly, she thinks again of the campfire at the mine and Zuko’s candles, and tries to push and pull the water she cannot see with her breath the way she uses her arms to direct the water she can see. She loses herself in the mediation, only jolting back to awareness when she realizes her feet are cold, shoes soaked with water that has leached up to obey her.

Chen hauls her slowly out of the well again after she hurries back into the harness and tugs the rope twice. When she emerges, Chen and Mayor Cao look to her with hopeful faces when they see the dust beneath her feet grow dark with water.

“It’s down there, alright,” she tells them, and the pair look ready to celebrate on the spot. It pains her to have to put a damper on their joy, but she has to tell them, “It’s deep though. I was calling to the water the whole time I was down there, and all that came was enough to get my feet wet.” Their faces fall.

“We still need an earthbender,” Mayor Cao says, grimly. “I can send messages to the neighboring towns, but they’re far, and the closest earthbender willing to come might be even farther.”

“I think I can help with that problem too,” Katara says.

Before dinner, she finishes her letter to Zuko and quickly writes a second letter to make the end of day mail run. After that, all that is left to do is wait. It’s something she’s never had a particular talent for, always wanting to be busy, to be useful, so she fills the time by healing blistering sunburns and soothing heat sickness. Lian sees Katara wring the water from a houseplant to fix Jing’s scraped knees after a day of playing outside, and promptly asks her to do the same to the flowers in her garden and spray it over the shabbiest-looking field. The other farming families in town hear of her ability and ask her to do the same. It saddens her to see so much beauty shrivel at her hands, but she can’t bring herself to refuse these people.

For days, there is no news, and the town’s water supplies dwindle even further. Jiahao leaves with his cart loaded up with a few empty barrels, bound for the nearest grand river. He returns, and still there is no answer to either of Katara’s letters, and she begins to fear that they got lost or will be delivered too slowly. It is of course just as she begins to think desperately of another plan that she exits the town’s infirmary to see a figure riding into town on a single ostrich horse. When he sees the familiar blue of her dress, he waves, and she startles the couple of people watching the stranger when she takes off running for him. He is dismounted and holding the reins when she barrels into him, and he picks her up in a tight hug.

“Haru!”

“I wrote a letter,” he says, smiling as he puts her back on her feet. “But I was hoping I might beat it to you.”

“You did. I was starting to worry mine got lost.”

“Well, it looks like we’re going to be just in time like usual.” She smiles at the reminder that she and her friends always manage to work things out in the end, and she tells him, “Come on, I’ll introduce you to Mayor Cao.”

The mayor looks like she wants to give Haru a similarly enthusiastic greeting when Katara introduces him as an old friend and very skilled earthbender. She manages to restrain herself and shows him to the central well. Chen is called back, and Jiahao comes along too, and the both of them lower Katara and Haru into the well together, though the space is so confined they only just fit.

It takes some fidgeting before they are both able to find space to move their arms enough to bend. Katara calmly takes hold of the water she can sense around them, and Haru feels out the bottom of the well itself.

“How much deeper should it go?” he asks.

She feels around and concludes, “Twenty feet?”

“Do we have enough rope for that?” He asks looking at the ends dangling from the pinpoint of light above them skeptically, and she grins.

“Once I have water, we won’t need rope.”

He returns her grin, and tells her, “Hold onto that water, this might be a little bumpy,” and takes a deep breath, winds up, then punches downward.

Katara has to bite back a scream as the ground lurches away from them in bursts, but she keeps hold of the groundwater that she can feel surrounding them as they descend further. When Haru stops bending and turns to her, she says, “This should be enough. Ready to get out of here?” He nods, and holds onto her as she lets the water seep in, running down the walls, pooling at their feet, swirling bit by bit into a waterspout to carry them up towards the sunlight.

They emerge to cheers from the small party with them, and other residents of the town stream out of homes and shops at the commotion. When they take in the sight of Katara and Haru emerging from the well completely drenched, they join in the celebration. She bends as much of the water as she can from their clothes and hair, returning it to the well, and then they are rushed off to start digging down the private wells at the farms as well. It takes two full days for them to get to all of the wells, and they are completely exhausted at the end of them, but one by one, they fill with water.

When Katara and Haru return to Jiahao’s farm with the family after a cobbled together feast, there is a Fire Nation soldier waiting in front of the house. Jiahao, Lian, and Haru freeze in instinctive fear, and Katara feels a spike of anxiety when she recognizes the man’s uniform as that of the soldiers specifically assigned to the Caldera. This man has been sent straight from the capital, and panicked thoughts of assassination attempts and uprisings and all that Zuko’s family entails race through her mind. He greets Katara with a very formal bow and addresses her as, “Master Katara,” and her companions move forward to back her as she approaches him. Only Jing is unafraid, looking between the strange travelling waterbender and the fancy soldier with open curiosity. “A message from the Fire Lord,” he says, and hands over a sealed letter that looks no different from the ones that have occasionally found her by regular post. “I also have been entrusted to deliver a package for a Miss Jing,” he says, looking to Lian. Katara is even more confused.

“That’s me!” Jing cries, bounding towards the soldier before her parents can grab hold of her. “I’m Jing!” The soldier looks shocked to find that he has been sent on a mission to deliver mail from the Fire Lord to a random child, but Jiahao nods to him that yes, that is her. The soldier hands her a small package wrapped in red paper and clears his throat. “There is a message along with the package,” he says. “Perhaps the lady would like me to read it aloud?” Jing nods excitedly, hands already pulling at the shining red paper.

Everyone crowds close to see as Jing unwraps the paper to reveal a slim wooden box carved with a map of the world. There are brass hinges on one side, and she flips it open to reveal a compass. The girl gasps quietly, marveling at the wobbling needle and shining glass dome over the delicately painted face. Her parents are speechless, and Katara feels her heart swell in her chest, creeping up her throat as the soldier reads,

_Dear Miss Jing,_

_I am told that you have aspirations of becoming a great explorer one day, provided the Avatar and I achieve the lasting peace we have promised. The world is a beautiful place, and I sincerely hope that you are able to see as much of it as you wish. Please accept this compass as a start to your preparations, and as a token of my commitment to peace between our nations._

_Sincerely,_

_Fire Lord Zuko_

_P.S. If I may make a recommendation in favor of my homeland, the beaches on Ember Island are exceptionally beautiful in the early summer. The island is also said to help reveal one’s true self, a rumor I wholeheartedly believe._

As he finishes and folds the letter back up to hand over, all of the adults are staring at Katara with varying degrees of curiosity. Jing, on the other hand, is torn between looking at Katara, her present, and the messenger. A high-pitched sound starts in the back of her throat, and her little feet start to tap out a giddy dance as she tugs at her parents’ clothes and says, “I got a letter from the Fire Lord! I got a _present_ from the Fire Lord! Can we go to Ember Island _this_ summer?”

Jiahao and Lian shake off their shock well enough to tell their daughter that this is a very special present indeed, and she should go inside and write Fire Lord Zuko a thank you note with her very best writing, but _no_ they will absolutely not be going to Ember Island until she’s older. She barely even pouts at the rejection when it is accompanied by the promise of getting to write a letter to real live royalty. With a bow and very precocious “thank you, sir,” that makes the soldier smile, she follows her mother inside.

“It is my pleasure, Miss Jing,” he replies. To Katara, he bows again and says, “I am under orders to wait if you would like me to carry a reply to His Majesty.” It still feels so weird to hear Zuko referred to so formally, and Katara is pretty sure she’ll never get used to it. They’ve been so many different things to each other over the long couple years since they met, but formality has never entered into it.

“I’ll go read this then,” Katara says, turning the letter over in her hand, rubbing her thumb over the now familiar seal. “I won’t keep you waiting too long.” She knows he would never rush her, would probably just stand outside all night like Zuko once had, waiting for her, but she feels bad anyway.

Jiahao clearly feels the same, as he offers the soldier a cup of tea with him and Haru “while the ladies are writing their correspondence.” He still looks a little disbelieving as Katara ducks behind the screen.

_Dear Katara,_

_I hope the royal guard wasn’t too excessive and didn’t blow your cover too badly, but I thought it might be fun for Jing. Makes it seem more like the beginning of a grand adventure._

_Speaking of grand adventures, I have a question for you about yours. Are you happy?_

_Yours Always,_

_Zuko_

Of course he could catch her so off guard in so few words. She really shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but she always seems to miscalculate the weight his words will have on her. Katara agonizes over her response until the moon is high and she can hear tea turn to cards. Long after Jing had bounded out to deliver her message before bedtime, she settles on the most honest answer she thinks she will be able to offer: _I think I’m getting there._ and then cannot resist asking him, _Are you happy?_ She seals the letter with melted candle wax and as usual presses her thumb into the half-solid lump to make sure it will stay, leaving behind the subtle pattern of her skin. It feels right that there is no title or family crest or even a nation to signal the letter as being from her, just the proof of what her hands have done.

Haru leaves the next morning, and when she tells him she’s making her way to Ba Sing Se, he offers to take her as far as Full Moon Bay before turning back to his own village. She decides to leave with him. It is another bittersweet goodbye, but when Jiahao asks, “So should we just write you letters ‘in care of the Fire Lord’?” she laughs as she says, “Yes, actually. I don’t have a more permanent address to give you.” It doesn’t escape her that Haru gives her a searching look at that admission, but he never asks her about it.

* * *

Arriving in Ba Sing Se alone is so different from when she had last been there just after the war. Then, she and her friends had arrived packed together on Appa’s saddle, still riding high on the feeling of victory and freedom. Now, she feels the overwhelming size of the city swallow her up until she is invisible. For the first time, she really understands how they could’ve spent so long within the walls before running into Zuko and Iroh.

The old man welcomes her warmly when she arrives, and that makes her feel less strangely anonymous. He insists she call him “Uncle” if she refuses to simply call him “Iroh” and when he shows her where she’s staying it is finally not the corner of a stranger’s house or the transient environment of an inn. There are only two bedrooms in the apartment above the Jasmine Dragon, so the room she will be staying in is Zuko’s, and not only in name. He has made himself at home there, even though he can’t visit as often as she knows he wants to. Never much for decoration, the walls are still sparse, but there are a worn pair of dao swords hung above the bed and half-melted candles on a table. A blanket she recognizes from their old camping gear is folded across the end of the bed, and there are playbills stuffed onto a shelf with some poorly-carved figurines that smack of Sokka’s handiwork.

Iroh notices her silent observation of the room and the way her hand brushes the threadbare fabric of the blanket as she looks around.

“You have been travelling for quite some time now, Master Katara,” he says, sitting beside her on the bed. His weight on the mattress shifts her towards him, and she finds herself leaning closer. The warm sturdy presence beside her and Sokka’s terrible artwork in front of her choke her with longing for home. She nods, but can’t speak for fear of bursting into tears on her host. Of course, anyone who is so diligent in loving Zuko has no need of words to understand a complicated tangle of emotions, so he keeps talking. “I am glad you have come to visit,” he says. “Retirement suits me quite well for the most part, and it is good to be near my Lu Ten.” His sad smile reminds her of what Zuko had told her of the end of Iroh’s days as the Dragon of the West - the failed siege of Ba Sing Se and his cousin’s death at its walls.

She reaches to take his hand, and he squeezes her fingers gratefully. “But I miss my nephew. It helps to have you children visit.”

“It helps us too,” she says, because she can imagine she is not the only one of their roving band of teenage war heroes that finds comfort in the familiar faces and trinkets of this apartment.”

“I am glad.” With that, he stands, brushing the wrinkles from his robes. “Now before I forget, you have mail. I left it on the desk over there. Rest and enjoy your letter. Lunch will be ready soon.” He pats his belly, and just like that, he is the jolly teamaker again.

The letter is from Zuko, because it could really only be from him, and when she unfolds it, it is brief like her last one. Apparently neither of them is particularly verbose on the topic of happiness.

_Dear Katara,_

_I’m sending this letter to Uncle’s since I don’t know where you’ll be by now, but I know you would never go back on a promise to visit him, so you’ll get this eventually. As for your question: Not right now, but I think I could be. Maybe even soon. At the very least, I feel hopeful._

_Yours Always,_

_Zuko_

Despite its brevity, she ends up needing a while to sit with the letter, and when she is distracted all through lunch, Uncle Iroh smiles knowingly.

“How is my nephew?” he asks, as though he does not certainly exchange far longer, more frequent letters with Zuko. She weighs how much she wants to tell him, but then realizes Uncle Iroh probably has a better answer to the question of her and Zuko than either of them.

“Almost happy,” she says. “But for now, he’s hopeful.” Iroh nods, taking in her words and considering them carefully. He takes a slow sip of tea to wash down some of his rice.

“Do you have any sense of how close ‘almost’ is?” It isn’t prodding, despite how easily it could be. He just seems curious to know whether she has an answer at all.

“I don’t,” she admits, but she finds that this place has helped to settle some of the restlessness that has been driving her for so many months, so she can also say, “But I know he’ll get there.” Uncle nods.

“That is good. A rich and fulfilling journey is what makes the destination worthwhile, afterall.”

She has been in Ba Sing Se for three days when her heart leaps at the familiar sound of Appa grunting, and the floor of the tea shop shakes with the force of his landing. Uncle immediately takes the tray of Oolong tea headed for table three out of her hands and nudges her towards the door, smiling indulgently at her excited face. Running at full speed, she bursts through the back door and has every intention of tackle-hugging Aang. Then the sight of Sokka hopping to the ground first makes her shriek and crush her brother’s ribs instead.

He jumps at the noise, but when he sees that it’s her, he lets out his own whoop of excitement, and Aang sends himself flying into the air laughing when he realizes their luck. She is overjoyed to see Sokka. It is like being reunited with a lost limb when he folds her into his arms and kisses her hair, and when he quickly wrestles her into a noogie, she knows that “lost” will never be the right word for their relationship. They grow, distance stretches, but like a compass needle will always point to North and South, Katara will always feel the pull of her brother, her opposite pole.

She finds herself tearing up when Aang joins them and she realizes that he has grown taller than her, and when Sokka starts teasing him about the small patch of fuzz on his chin, she starts crying.

“Look what you did,” Sokka accuses him, pointing at her. “That thing is so ugly it’s making Katara tear-bend.” Aang mistakes her laughter for sobbing and starts frantically trying to comfort her and she loves them so much and tells them so.

“We love you too,” Aang says immediately, and Sokka makes a face, but admits,

“I missed you a lot.” It makes her cry all over again when she catches the smell of seal jerky on Sokka’s clothes, and he starts sniffling too.

“Aw come on you guys,” Aang whines, a little wobbly. “You’re gonna make me cry too.” They pull him into a group hug, and she feels just a bit more complete with the three of them together again.

“I hitched a ride from Kyoshi,” Sokka tells her when she demands to know why she didn’t know they were travelling together again. “Aang wanted to pop up here to say hey to Uncle, and then he’s gonna bring me home.”

“Pretty big detour for a free ride,” Katara says, trying not to feel jealous of them backtracking through their old adventures without her.

“Hey, I don’t get out much these days. Plus now you can come with! We’ll get the old band back together.” He rubs his hands together, grinning, and Aang nods enthusiastically, practically bouncing in the booth they commandeered.

“It’ll be great!” Aang promises. “We can go penguin sledding again!”

“And Dad can take us ice dodging for real!”

“And we can make snowmen!”

“And eat Gran-Gran’s stewed sea prunes!”

“...Yeah, I guess we can do that too.” She laughs at Aang’s dubious expression and both of them leaning across the table to plead with her.

“You guys don’t have to give me the hard sell,” she says. “I was already thinking of going home for a little while after here. I don’t have any other plans lined up just yet, and...I’ve been homesick.”

“Well, home’s been sick for you,” Sokka confesses, scratching at the back of his neck and looking out the window.

“Then it’s settled.”

For the last couple days they’re in the city, Sokka and Aang camp out on the limited floor space of Zuko’s room, and even though Sokka and Momo snore, Katara sleeps better than she has in months. Uncle Iroh seems thrilled to have a full house and so many extra hands in the shop. He has some part time servers, but “It’s not the same as having family around.” Katara first thinks that he is feeling the absence of Lu Ten and Zuko, but the relief in his voice brings the realization that he means that _they_ are his family too. Somehow she had thought that the whole “call me Uncle” business had been offering some honorific besides the “General” he had long wanted to shed. The realization that he meant it so affectionately makes her hug him tightly at their parting, murmuring, “Thank you, Uncle,” as she has heard Zuko do several times before.

* * *

The South Pole is almost nothing like Katara remembers, at least on the outside. She has to wear one of Sokka’s old parkas because she is too big for all of her old clothing and none of her traveling clothes are warm enough. There are buildings of packed snow and the start of a canal system like the North, and more people wander around the center of the almost-city, but the important parts - the parts that make it home, that made _her_ , are still there. Her reunion with her father is similar to seeing Sokka again, and she can’t bring herself to let go of him for long minutes as the pang she had felt with Uncle comes back tenfold. It doesn’t seem like Hakoda has much interest in letting either of his children go anytime soon, and in the end it falls to Sokka to break it up so they can get on with the day.

Of course, the first place she asks to go after her Dad meets her out in the square is home. This no longer refers to the fur-laden tents she grew up in, and the expansion of the tribe with the returned warriors and permanent Northern delegation means that the houses weren’t even built in the same place the tents used to be. It’s strange to walk in through a door instead of a flap, and to have an entire second floor, but her nose tells her exactly where she needs to go.

Gran-Gran looks the same as she has for as long as Katara can remember, and she wonders why she had expected her to look as different as Katara herself did. It has been two years since she saw her last, but that is nothing to a lifetime like Gran-Gran’s. At Katara’s age, she had still been living at the North Pole, entirely clueless about the life she would build a world away. When she quietly announces, “I’m home,” from the doorway, her grandmother drops the ladle right into the soup she was stirring and promptly abandons the cooking fire entirely to shuffle across the floor as quickly as she can and yank Katara into a hug.

Katara has to bend down quite a bit to return the hug properly, and she has a sudden terrifying thought that her grandmother feels so much smaller and frailer than she remembered. She feels guilt sucking at her stomach, emptying her out, as she thinks of all the time she wasted in taking so long to get back home. Then Gran-Gran pulls back and appraises her for a moment before declaring, “I think you’ve grown even more than your brother. Look at you!” she gestures to all of her. “Gotten stronger too,” she says, squeezing Katara’s upper arms. She nods approvingly. “Good. I’d have to give Pakku a talking to if he hadn’t trained you up right.” Katara’s laugh gets strangled by a resurgence of tears. She can’t even find it in herself to be properly angry when she hears Sokka coughing “tear-bender” from the other room because she’s so relieved that his voice really is just feet away instead of in her head.

Just before they leave for a welcome dinner, Hakoda shows Katara to the room upstairs that had been left for her. The scant belongings she had left behind when she left the South Pole are there, as well as a wooden bed and desk. There are a few gifts that have arrived too: pottery and beautifully decorated water skins from the Northern Water Tribe, hair combs and embroidered fans from the Earth Kingdom - tokens of gratitude sent to the Avatar’s waterbending master, and her father assures her that he and Gran-Gran made sure to send thank you notes on her behalf. What he really brought her to see, though, is the familiar trunk pushed against the end of her bed. She recognizes it immediately as the old one from her parents’ things. The one they had packed her mother’s belongings away in.

“I think some of her old clothes will fit you now,” Hakoda says when she walks over to it. “If you want. It didn’t seem right to decide what to do with them until you and your brother were both here.” She’s had enough of crying today, so she blinks back a fresh wave of tears, but her throat aches and she has to hold her breath for a moment before she can say, “Thank you.”

Later, wearing her mother’s clothes, she looks in the icy mirror on her wall and sees her mother staring back at her for a moment. It is like a thousand dreams she’s had before, looking into her mother’s eyes again. The last time she properly studied her own reflection was probably almost a year ago now, dressing for celebrations at the palace after Zuko’s coronation. Back then she’d had the same shocked feeling of seeing her mom, and now she traces the subtle differences she had memorized then - how her skin is darker and lightly freckled from long stretches outdoors, how her eyebrows are shaped more like her father’s, and how her hair is curlier - until she feels as though this face is hers. She notes another new difference, as she shakes out her arms and straightens up. Verging on sixteen, she is a little taller and broader than her mother had been. Not enough to have outgrown her loose dresses, but the way she holds this frame makes her look so much bigger. She stands like her father, like a warrior. She smiles at herself.

Apparently Katara is the only one who notices the ways she is different, the things about her that mark her as belonging with Hakoda and Sokka. All through the welcome feast, she is told by anyone who can remember Kya that she is the spitting image of her mother. When her father and brother had said so when she went downstairs, she had smiled easily, but it starts to wear on her the more she hears it. As the moon rises and the wine flows, a couple of people actually slip up and call her “Kya” and she feels sick even as they catch themselves.

Weeks pass, and the bittersweet feeling of her first day home does not abate. She plays in the snow with Sokka and Aang, and gets an extensive tour from her father. Gran-Gran brushes and braids her hair every morning and tells her stories over tea late into the night. But the remarks about how much she looks like her mother slowly turn into people treating her like she _is_ her mother and it grates. Hakoda’s coat loses a button when she’s with him and Sokka at a meeting about fishing exports and one of the new Northerners hands the button to her “to mend when you get home.” One of the elders raises an eyebrow at _her_ when Sokka displays his horrifying table manners.

 _I really do love my home_ , she writes when she recounts this to Zuko. _And I’m so happy that I came back, but Aang is giving Suki a ride South soon and I think I’ll probably leave with him when he moves on. I needed to see Gran-Gran, and I missed Dad and Sokka, but I think my homesickness is cured for a while. These past few weeks have reminded me why I didn’t come back in the first place. When I’m here, I’m Hakoda and Kya’s daughter, and I’m proud of that, but I’m more than that too. It’s easier to be all of myself somewhere else._

_I hope you don’t mind that this letter is a little “Dear Diary”. You’re a kind of somewhere else too though. Our relationship is pretty complicated, but I think that’s good. You’re never what I expect you to be (and I like to think I’ve surprised you a few times) so in a certain sense we just don’t have that same weight of expectation. It’s just easier to say these things to someone who doesn’t have ideas about who we should be. At least, that’s how I think of it. Maybe I’m just being ridiculous._

_If I am, you can just consider this a heads up if you start to hear about weird stuff happening in the Fire Nation again. That’s probably me. I hope things haven’t fallen apart too badly since I’ve been gone - I hear that new Fire Lord is kind of hopeless without me._

_Love,_

_Katara_

She borrows Hawky to send the letter, hoping she’ll be able to get a reply before she leaves again. The downside of going back on the road is that she doesn't know when she’ll be able to give a new address. Being home, dealing with the discordance between the new buildings and people with all of the old grief, really has gotten to be too much for her though. Her family doesn’t even try to fight her on it when she announces her plans, and guilt wants to well up at the thought of them having seen her growing restlessness so easily. They tell her they’re proud of her though, and remind her that the South Pole will always be her home even if it’s never the place she needs to stay. It helps.

Hearing from Zuko helps too, both in terms of letting her know that she’s making the right choice and in providing her initial incentive to follow her instincts. His reply has even more of the earnestness that had once made her flinch away, but with the opposite effect.

 _You’re right._ He says. _About all of it. I’m all of myself with you too. Also, the Fire Lord is pretty helpless without you. He’s a little helpless about you too, but that’s not a bad thing. I hope you don’t think so either._

_Love,_

_Zuko_

Finally she lets herself think that she needs to see him. She thinks he might be the place she needs to stay. He might be the compromise between the itching under her skin when people call her the Avatar’s waterbender or the chief’s daughter and the longing she feels thinking of fresh snow or laughing around campfires. It’s at once terrifying and exhilarating to think that her long, aimless quest might have finally helped her figure out how to make peace and be happy.

* * *

Aang is only going as far as the newly reconstructed shrine to Avatar Roku at the edge of the Fire Nation, but he drops Katara off on the nearest populated island and that’s good enough for her. When they part, she tells him that she’s making her way to Caldera City, and he gives her an extra hug “to pass on to Zuko”. She gives him an extra hug “for the road” and then doesn’t look up when she hears Appa take off. Instead, she looks to the horizon, adjusts the straps of her pack, and starts walking again.

She is a day into her hike across the main island when the smell of woodsmoke reaches her long before she should be able to smell cooking fires from the village up ahead. Katara starts running. As she crests the hill ahead, the sky has a hazy cast to it, but there is no sign of fire in the buildings in the town below. There are also no people outside, despite the fact that the sun is out and it is summer, and she is cautious as she walks down the main stretch of road. In past experience, eerily quiet towns usually spell bad news for her.

A building with a sign advertising tea and steamed buns draws her attention, and her stomach growls. Taking a page from Sokka’s book, she goes inside. There are a few people scattered around the tables, and a bored-looking hostess up front who tenses when she sees an obviously unfamiliar face.

“Hello. Welcome to The Steaming Duck.” She looks Katara over dubiously. “How many in your party?”

“Um, just me,” she says, shrugging her pack off and holding it at her side.

“Right this way,” the hostess says, and starts leading her towards a small table tucked by a window. From it, she can see the weird haze again, and it makes her ask,

“What’s going on with the sky? Why does this whole place smell like smoke?” The hostess's mouth twists into something sad.

“Forest fire. I wouldn’t plan to stay in town long if I were you.” She wants to call her back and ask for more information, but she shoves a menu into Katara’s hands and wishes her a nice meal before disappearing through a swinging door.

Despite the grim atmosphere, the food is delicious, and the waitress that brings her meal is more talkative.

“We sent someone to request assistance from the Fire Lord, but we probably won’t know if any is coming until they arrive or Izo returns alone. For now, we have shifts of people passing buckets from the river, but it’s hard to get close enough, and there aren’t enough of us to stop it.”

“Do you know how to get to them?” Katara asks, confidence swelling at the mention of a river. The waitress nods slowly, looking at her uncertainly. “I’m a waterbender,” she says, and no longer feels an undercurrent of panic at admitting so in Fire Nation territory. The waitress nods again, more enthusiastically, and disappears for a moment.

When she’s back, she’s brought a pencil and an old specials list and starts drawing a map on the back. Katara leaves the restaurant a few moments later, full and with the map tucked into the waistband of her skirt. She’s a waterbending master. With a whole river at her command, she can accomplish anything.

Unfortunately, “river” seems to be a somewhat generous description of the body of water where she finds the bucket line. It’s more than a stream, but not quite the endless gush of water she had hoped for. Especially not when she gets closer to the fire line and sees smoke blackening the sky and feels the heat of the flames raising the temperature.

“You’ll have to turn back!” shouts the woman who seems to be directing the line, and Katara doesn’t know what she means at first before she realizes that she still looks like a traveler with her pack.

“I’m not trying to pass through, I’m here to help,” she says. “I’m a waterbender.” A few people in the bucket line falter, and excited murmuring starts up.

“Are _you_ the Fire Lord’s aid?” the woman asks, eyes glinting with dark humor.

“No,” she says honestly. “I don’t know what the Fire Lord is doing,” _but it had better be something - Spirits, Zuko_ “I just smelled the smoke and came here.”

“Well, it looks like we’re certainly going to need you. I’m Sada.”

“Katara. Nice to meet you.”

“Trust me, the pleasure’s all mine, waterbender.”

Katara falls into work easily as ever. It’s physically demanding, hiking to and from the river while bending large streams of water overhead and the heat that would be brutal on a normal summer day is oppressive, but the pull in her muscles feels right. Sada directs her as they try to push the fire back from the village. The villagers assure her that they’re making much better progress with her help, but Katara can’t help but feel as though she is running eternally uphill as they have to fall back closer to the river’s banks over the course of the day. They are fighting it well, but it is clear that if no help comes from the capital the village will have to evacuate very soon.

That night, she takes a room at the inn and eats a quick dinner from the rations in her pack before venturing back out into the town. As the moon rises, she travels from house to house, healing smoke-damaged lungs and burns from wayward embers. When she collapses into her bed, she is too tired to undress and wakes to her hair in a riot from being left up overnight. She wrestles it into a tighter braid and then wraps it into a bun to get the weight of it away from her back before she leaves for the fire.

She grows frustrated with the river, unable to take as much as she needs from it for fear of drying it out and leaving them with nothing. It would be so nice if she could bend the water from the plants to heap on the flames, but dry wood and underbrush would just be more fuel. The limits of what she can do infuriate her, and she finds herself wishing for the endless sea or even the wide lazy Jang Hui river. Being able to offer healing keeps her from feeling completely useless when she exhausts the river’s surplus and has to turn back towards town. Still, it is a far cry from what is necessary.

The third day she is with the villagers in the forest, one of the men on the bucket line spots an airship in the distance and alerts everyone. Efforts are redoubled, real hope starting to creep onto people’s faces as more ships appear headed in their direction. Buckets fly, and Katara throws sprays of water with renewed energy. _Of course_ , she thinks, smiling at the sky, _Never count Zuko out._

When the first airship opens the doors that used to drop bombs and unleashes a deluge of water, the buckets get forgotten in favor of cheering and hugging.

“Looks like the cavalry came after all,” Sada says, crossing her arms and watching approvingly as the other airships pass overhead and drop their cargo.

“It always does,” Katara says, wonderingly. The hiss of fire and water is almost deafening and steam rolls across the forest. She gathers the clouds of steam and flings the water back into the fire again, and the rush of her own power tingles under her skin.

The airships pass overhead, the lead one heading for the village while the others turn towards the sea.

“They’ll have to refill,” Sada says, too quiet for the others to hear, brow creased. “I don’t know how fast those things will be able to go. This is better, but the fire’s too close for gradual. We’re gonna need a miracle by nightfall tomorrow or everyone needs to get out.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Katara reassures her, and for the moment she even believes it.

The village is already in an uproar when the excited members of the bucket crew stream out of the forest hollering about the airships. It is immediately apparent what the cause is when they see the massive airship landed in a nearby field and the Fire Nation soldiers already carrying pump hoses towards the woods. Claps on shoulders are exchanged as the villagers pass the soldiers and both crews are congratulating each other and wishing luck. Still, the crowd of people grows thicker as they approach the town square, and it seems that everyone that had been hiding inside for the past several days is out and about.

Their reason becomes clear once Katara enters the archway to the central courtyard and sees Zuko, fancy robes and all, standing on the small announcement stage. Her heart leaps in her chest. The first time she had seen him dressed up like that, he had still been weak from the duel with his sister and was barely holding back the anxiety that ate at him. It had left him looking like a boy wearing his father’s clothes, but he has grown into the robes he wears in more ways than one. He looks _right_ addressing his people so intimately, every bit the idealistic young ruler Iroh said the Fire Nation needed.

She can still tell the moment his eyes happen upon her in the crowd. It probably doesn’t register with anyone else, too in awe of their ruler standing in the center of their tiny town, but she notices the slight double-take. She sees the way he looks fleetingly stunned and then has to wrestle the ecstatic smile that tries to erupt into something small and benevolent. Then he looks away, but his eyes skirt near her too often for her to think for a second he has forgotten or dismissed her presence.

When he disperses the crowd to go eat and sleep and visit the doctors he brought along, his eyes seize on her immediately, silently begging her to stay behind. She does, tucking herself beside a column to wait out the crowd without drawing attention. Slowly but surely, the courtyard empties except for Zuko and the secretary and officer accompanying him, and she steps out of the shadows. The other two startle at the strange and admittedly disheveled young woman approaching. Zuko doesn’t address their surprise at how warmly he asks,

“What are you doing here?”

She smiles and holds out her arms in a _what can you do_ gesture. “Passing through.”

“Oh yeah? Heading where?” They are close now. Not quite close enough to touch yet, but close enough that either of them could easily reach out.

“There’s someone I’ve been really needing to see.” The longing on his face is so bare, she feels ridiculously obtuse for not noticing it sooner. Chances are good her own face is similarly desperate, because Zuko’s companions clear their throats and retreat with quick bows and mumbled excuses.

When they are alone, he asks, “How long have you been needing to see them?”

“I don’t know,” she admits. “But it’s been a while. Longer than I could guess probably.” Then, because she is tired of being oblique, and because she wants to be as honest in person as he was in his letters, she takes a step towards him and says, “It’s really good to see you. I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you too,” he says, cheeks flushing just a little but his eyes still holding hers.

“Kind of weird, us running into each other like this,” she muses.

“Destiny is a funny thing.”

“I can never outrun you,” she says with a smile. “You always turn up eventually.” He smiles ruefully and scratches at the back of his head, upsetting his crown.

“Yeah, I guess I’m a bit like a dented copper piece.”

“Maybe it felt like that at first, but…” She shrugs and steps closer.

“But what?” he takes a step towards her.

“Now I think it’s a good thing. You never give up. And I can always count on you to show up when it matters.” His smile is whole when she is close enough to haul him into a hug and get his robes all messed up. They’re going to be smudged with dirt and will probably smell like sweat, but she doesn’t feel bad about it when he wraps his arms around her in return. His nose presses against her temple, and his breath is in her ear, and the skin of his neck is warm and smooth when she hides her face in it.

There is no time for a lengthy reunion. He walks her to the inn and he lets her go after another tight hug even though he is still watching her leave when she looks back from the doorway. She races up the stairs to the window in her room and watches him until even his shadow has disappeared. The grime of the day gets washed away into the basin in the bathroom, and when she settles in bed she thinks that the next day will be a good one.

Against the advice of his guards, Zuko ventures to the fire line with Katara and the morning crew of soldiers. He insists though, and eventually the presence of a master waterbender is accepted as safe enough. The airships and soldiers have worked through the night, but as Sada had warned, the distance to and from the sea means that the fire is still encroaching, just slower and slower. An officer tells them another full day of the same might be enough to stall them and start pushing back, but everyone agrees that by sundown the fire will likely be too close to the village to let people remain in their homes. Zuko sends one of his men back to the village immediately to have the remaining troops start making evacuation preparations.

The fire is nearly at the river’s bank, which means Katara doesn’t have to walk back and forth as much. She and Zuko spend the day zig zagging between the river and the burning trees. They are making their way back when Katara asks, “Do you really think the village will burn?”

“I don’t know,” he says. She looks at him out of the corner of her eye while she keeps part of her focus on spraying the last of the water in front of her as they walk. Dressed down in a tunic and pants, crown left behind, he looks more like the Zuko that had struggled to help her reign in the unruly children roaming the Ember Island house. “Better they plan to leave though. This way the worst case scenario is that it burns, but we were prepared. Best case, the whole town has an impromptu camping trip and everyone goes back when the fire is out.”

“How likely do you think the best case is?” He sighs, sounding too tired for someone his age.

“Not very likely. Even with the airships, the fire is going to overtake the river by sundown. When they say another day like yesterday could stall it, that’s factoring in the hoses running all night, and while they’re not as good as the airships, they’re more precise. That’s probably another half a day before we can get it stalled. Then we have to hope that the airships don’t miss and flood part of town and no gusts of wind blow embers closer.”

“So it’s not looking good.”

“When is it ever?” Despite the attempt at a joke, she can tell that he’s entirely serious.

A loud crack splits the air, and Katara whirls around to see a burning tree falling towards them. Without thinking, she rips the water from the tree closest to her and shoves outward. The water whip lifts the tree and shoves it backwards, and the rolling flames devour it and the water with a hissing, crackling noise that sounds eerily like laughter. Zuko is studying her intently, not unlike the time he had seen her bloodbend, and she doesn’t know what to make of it.

“We need to go,” she tells him. “I’ve used as much of the river as I can, and it’s going to get dark soon.” He agrees, and they hurry back to the others. As they walk, Zuko is silent, frowning slightly into the distance and Katara wonders what he’s thinking so hard about.

He doesn’t keep her waiting long, inviting her to eat dinner on the airship with him. Perpetually alternating between direct and awkward, Zuko opts for directness that night and has barely finished pouring her tea before he says, “I have an idea of how to stop the fire.”

She grips her cup tightly, and she feels a cold thrill in her veins. “What is it?”

He surprises her for the hundredth, the thousandth, time talking about how Uncle learned to redirect lightning from the waterbenders, and how firebenders can use their inner fire to make candles and campfires flare brighter. “And then that thing you did with the tree earlier. I just...I was trying to think how Uncle would think, and I was wondering if maybe you think it would be possible...if it would be possible to bend the fire out of the forest?” Katara is speechless for a moment, and tries to cover it up by diligently stirring her noodles as his words sink in. He’s definitely crazy. Definitely crazy, and it is with equal parts fear and admiration that she thinks of him pulling Azula’s lightning into his body and casting it out. But then again,

“I mean, what’s the worst you do?” she speculates. “Blow a bunch of fire into a forest fire? It’s getting really close to the village, I don’t think you could possibly make it _worse_ at this point.”

“Desperate times call for wacky plans.” They grin at each other over the table, and she swallows her fear down with the next mouthful of noodles.

At sunrise, once again to the protests of his royal guard, Zuko travels out to the fire’s boundary with Katara. Sure enough, in the night the fire reached the bank of the river and it spread across through the canopy of leaves. Zuko chooses a spot that seems a safe distance away and assumes the familiar pose of his daily meditation, attempting to sync his inner fire with the inferno. It looks hard - _firebending comes from the breath_ , Katara remembers Zuko telling Aang a thousand times, and being close enough to concentrate on the flames means that the air is getting pretty hot and hard to breathe. Sweat beads on his brow, and his expression turns pained.

“Are you okay?” she asks, and he opens his eyes, breaking his stance with a weary sigh.

“The fire is strong. It feels almost like it has a will of its own.” Katara thinks she knows what he means. That’s what bloodbending feels like to Katara - it’s your element, but in this form, it has a will that can oppose you. _Fire is life_.

“You can’t just try to connect with it,” she tells him. “You have to feel out its rhythms, but then you have to take control of them, make them your own. Waterbending is all about feeling the natural push and pull but then shifting it into a push and pull that comes from us.” She grabs his arm and pulls him to his feet. “Here, I’ll show you,” she says, and starts tugging at his limbs until he is in the same stance she uses to swirl the water around herself when she stands in the shallows of the ocean. As a parting comfort, she blows out a breath and freezes the sweat on his forehead to cool him for a moment. “Connect. Then push and pull.” He nods once, then turns back to the fire, this time staring deeply into it instead of closing his eyes. One eye always on Zuko, Katara watches the fire burn.

She is turning to tell him they need to pull back when he does it. The fire stops advancing, but seems to shrink and grow with his measured inhales and exhales. She is not a firebender, so the flares of heat and smoke drive her back, but she stays close enough to watch him. She’s not sure what’s going to happen, but knows she can’t stop him. She can’t bring herself to leave him truly alone, and she knows that if what he tries doesn’t work and he burns himself to a crisp, she’ll likely go up with him, but someone owes it to him to look.

And then he breathes in as deep as he possibly can, just like she used to see him do before launching into an elaborate form, and he starts to move his arms in a familiar way. It’s the same motion she uses to push and pull waves. When the fire starts to ebb and flow with his motions, not just his breath, he plants his feet firmly, inhales deeply one last time, and on the exhale, he pushes outwards and upwards, like he’s trying to capsize a ship. For a horrible moment, the fire flares impossibly brighter as the wave peaks, roaring, making the skin on her face feel dry and tight, and then, miraculously, it crests and collapses into the charred ground behind it, breaking until all that’s left is the hiss of smoke dissipating.

When he turns to her, he stumbles, and she lurches forward to catch him. The air is so hot and dry, like being in the desert again. He staggers forward a few more steps under his own power, and as his knees give out, she reaches him and grips his elbows. Katara helps him settle on the forest floor gently and reaches out a hand to call water out of the bush beside them. She is already reaching for his chest with glowing fingers when he grabs her wrist and manages to say, “I’m just tired.”

The water falls away, but his tunic is already so sweaty it doesn’t make much difference. He sighs at the coolness of it though, relaxing into her, and this feels too much like a memory, and her heart is still thunderous in her chest, and then she is kissing him.

It’s clumsy because they are both so exhausted and sweaty and dirty, but she feels his breath on her cheek and his heart picking up speed under her palm and nothing has ever been better. His fingers tighten on her wrist, keeping her hand pressed to his scarred face, keeping her from moving away. When she starts to pull back and withdraw her hand, he doesn’t fight her though, shifting just enough to look at her. The cautious, true smile she had started to get to know before she left him last time creeps onto his face.

“I promise I’m not dying.”

“I know,” she says. “That’s not why I did it.”

“Good.” He slides a hand into her hair and pulls her mouth back to his.

The second kiss is shorter and less messy, but it is the one that makes Katara’s face split into a grin wide enough that it forces them apart.

“If you’re not dying, we probably need to go and tell your poor guards that they don’t have to go explain how the Fire Lord got fried.” He sighs, closing his eyes and tipping his forehead against hers.

“I know.” She hums and reaches up to start stroking her fingers through his hair. It’s just as gross and sweaty as the rest of him, but he leans into it, and she can’t keep herself entirely still right now. “I’ll be able to get up and walk in a minute,” he promises. In the meantime, she just holds him tight, and he readjusts to be able to hold her too. The quiet that settles is okay. Words have come easily enough between them this past year. For now, they can enjoy having this new thing.

When Zuko gets to his feet he is slow and not as steady as he usually is, but he makes it on his own. He reaches down to help Katara up, and she takes his hand even though she doesn’t let him take much of her weight. He smiles at her like he knows exactly what she’s doing but doesn’t call her on it. In exchange, she doesn’t comment when he tangles their fingers together instead of letting her put an arm around him for support. They walk back towards the village, slow and feeling aches in their bones, but each of them standing on their own, together.


End file.
